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Butterflies and Wings

  • Chapter
The Hot-Blooded Insects

Abstract

ON ANY walk in a hot, lowland, tropical jungle you will meet brilliant butterflies on their sojourns amongst the foliage. You will see them on mountain meadows covered with carpets of colorful flowers and on the tundra above the Arctic circle. Butterflies are found in an extraordinary range of geographical, ecological, and thermal environments, and wherever they live their activity is strongly affected by thermoregulation. In the northern hemisphere two of the more eye-catching examples are the European peacock Inachis io (Fig. 2.1) and the Holarctic mourning cloak Nymphalis antiopa. Both butterflies hibernate as adults. In Vermont and Maine the mourning cloak is already active in late March, while the ground is still covered in deep snow. It flies long before any leaf or flower buds have opened, stopping periodically to feed on sap oozing from tree wounds and to expose its dark “cloak” to the warming sun.

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Heinrich, B. (1993). Butterflies and Wings. In: The Hot-Blooded Insects. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-10340-1_3

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